Zoho recognized as a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms once again!

Zoho recognized as a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms once again!

Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms

Published 5 September 2023 - ID G00779564 - 55 min read

By Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, and 3 more
Sales force automation platforms have continued to evolve, with vendors addressing UI complexity and planning to embed generative AI capabilities to augment existing critical capabilities. Applications and software engineering leaders can use this research to support their CRM sales evaluation process.

    Strategic Planning Assumptions

    By 2026, B2B sales organizations using generative-AI-embedded sales technologies will reduce the amount of time spent on prospecting and customer-meeting prep by over 50%.
    By 2028, 60% of B2B seller work will be executed through conversational user interfaces (UIs) via generative AI sales technologies, up from less than 5% in 2023.

    Market Definition/Description

    Sales force automation platforms are tools that natively support (not via third-party add-ons and solutions) automation and capture of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for organizations’ sales professionals. They also support initiation, engagement and capture of buyer-seller interactions through multiexperience and channel-agnostic approaches and devices, and dissemination of actionable insights to improve sales contact management, pipeline management, opportunity management, guided selling and forecasting process execution. The optimal desired experience for sales users (leadership, managers and sellers) are not limited to internal use cases, and can be scaled to support buyer-seller intermediation and shared experiences with prospects and customers.
    Sales force automation (SFA) is a foundational sales technology, implemented to automate and augment an organization’s core sales processes while also improving the seller’s ability to engage via customer interaction touchpoints and devices.
    The standard capabilities of SFA systems include:
    • Lead, account, contact and opportunity management
    • Sales activity management
    • Collaboration
    • Guided selling
    • Pipeline and forecast management
    • Mobile, IoT device(s), bot capabilities
    • Visualizations and analytics
    • Partner relationship management capabilities
    • Platform, integration and composability
    • Proposal and quote builder (not formal configure, price and quote [CPQ])
    Optional capabilities include:
    • CPQ applications or suites
    • Digital sales rooms
    • Revenue intelligence
    • Sales engagement
    • Revenue enablement (digital content management, training and coaching)

    Magic Quadrant

    Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms

    Vendor Strengths and Cautions
    BUSINESSNEXT
    BUSINESSNEXT is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Formerly CRMNEXT, the company launched its umbrella brand BUSINESSNEXT in November 2022. BUSINESSNEXT is a compendium of different enterprise solutions, with a focus on financial services and insurance globally, and CRMNEXT has become the platform for their SFA solution and wider suite, with marketing and service technologies. Recent enhancements include out-of-the-box industry models for AI/ML, video data analytics and bot support for multichannel communications. It promises to deliver new capabilities on its roadmap in the form of a new bot builder with a multilanguage AI model support, and the ability to augment via generative AI (GPT and other large language models). It also plans a new, reimagined user experience and design system.
    Strengths
    • Platform Flexibility: BUSINESSNEXT comprises technology platforms, including CRMNEXT, which includes SFA features, DATANEXT with support for intelligent data management, and CUSTOMERNEXT, which is dedicated to customer experience (CX). It offers more than 12 preassembled products. Customers can reassemble, rearrange and reorient their technology components via BUSINESSNEXT’s modular architecture. It will allow customers scalability, cloud-native delivery, no-code configurations, and higher product transparency.
    • Deployment Options: Since CRMNEXT SFA is developed on a single codebase, customers have freedom of choice in terms of deployment and scalability. CRMNEXT can be deployed on a private cloud (third-party infrastructure), cloud in its own data center (infrastructure owned by the customer) and in the CRMNEXT cloud (SaaS). All deployments use the same codebase.
    • Account and Contact Scoring: CRMNEXT SFA users can take advantage of account and contact health scoring, with real-time engagement metrics like credit scores and risk scores. These scoring models are powered by AI/ML models that analyze multiple parameters, like number of successful interactions, number of deals closed, pending deal negotiations and others. Additionally, sellers can have access to health scores like customer satisfaction, customer sentiment and lifetime value. Key contacts inside accounts can also be scored based on approachability, loyalty activity, mailing activity, response rate and customizable parameters.
    Cautions
    • Few Implementation Providers: BUSINESSNEXT has among the smallest number of implementation service providers when compared to remaining vendors in this Magic Quadrant. All of their service delivery in the North America region is provided by in-house teams only. This is a consideration for sales organizations that prefer to have multiple options when contracting with an SFA vendor.
    • No Apps Marketplace: BUSINESSNEXT does not provide a marketplace for complementing or extending its own functionalities through independent software vendors (ISVs). While ISVs would be able to configure solutions on its platform using low-code and no-code approaches, BUSINESSNEXT is not actively seeking ISV extensions. This limits the potential total value of investing in CRMNEXT, compared with vendors that have a vibrant ecosystem.
    • Product Packaging and Pricing: BUSINESSNEXT has limited product packaging and pricing options. It only offers a single edition, and all subscriptions are locked in on a mandatory three-year term.
    Creatio
    As a Challenger in the Magic Quadrant, Creatio recently enhanced its application’s aesthetics with the Freedom UI Designer. Its platform, Sales Creatio, caters to diverse use cases including B2B, B2C and partner channel sales, utilizing its unique, no-code solution. It holds a strong presence in industries such as financial services, professional services and manufacturing. The platform integrates ChatGPT for AI-led workflow automation. Looking forward, Creatio’s roadmap plans to utilize generative AI for SFA app development, enabling users to create applications via prompts. Additionally, it is releasing microapplications that individualize SFA critical capabilities for reuse in any application or business process.
    Strengths
    • Guided Selling Capabilities: Creatio has stronger guided selling capabilities than the remaining vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Most notable is their ability to show statistical correlations to multiple potential actions and outcomes, to best optimize decision making. This is important when sales users want to better understand which approach will yield the best results in a guided-sales process.
    • Customer Community: Creatio offers free, personalized, business-user-friendly, no-code documentation to its customers. This is particularly important for sales organizations that are looking to become more agile in their ability to enable their business technologists, and want to move at a faster pace than their IT department can support.
    • Vertical Strategy: Creatio has expanded its vertical application portfolio to support up to 20 industries via natively built and/or partner-led vertical industry add-ons through its marketplace for its Sales Creatio product. This is an important consideration for buyers, because it enables faster implementations in specific industries.
    Cautions
    • Postsale Customer Success: Creatio possesses a limited customer success management approach when compared to that of leading SFA vendors in this Magic Quadrant. For example, it offers mostly self-help services and general implementation best practices, instead of more tailored approaches, as Creatio no longer provides in-house consulting services.
    • Collaboration: Creatio has limited collaborative SFA capabilities. For example, its solution does not allow for co-creating, co-editing or co-viewing of sales documentation; it is dependent on third-party tools to do a partial set of these capabilities.
    • Bot Capabilities: Creatio’s bot capability is not natively built, but requires procurement through third-party providers within their marketplace. This is important, as many leading vendors offer native platforms for bot-building development, especially as sales organizations start to support more autonomous buying cycles, and is also an important consideration for total cost of ownership.
    Freshworks
    Freshworks is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its Freshsales product is aimed primarily at small and midsize enterprises in multiple vertical industries, with highest presence in professional services and high tech/software. It is a SaaS-only solution that is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, and is also available with marketing automation as part of the Freshsales suite, at the same list price. As of the end of this research in March 2023, the product’s enhancements include configure, price, quote with native eSignature support, and an outbound sales sequences solution with customizable sales journeys. Freshworks has a forever-free edition of the product, which can be used as a minimum viable product. Its roadmap will also deliver additional support for sandboxes and a hierarchical structure for custom sales activities, such as viewing sales targets and attainment.
    Strengths
    • Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service and Peer Insights platform have praised Freshworks for its affordable pricing and free-to-use edition. The forever-free edition allows the users to familiarize themselves with the product before committing to a full rollout.
    • Collaboration: The Freshsales suite supports a unified messaging platform for collaborating with buyers who use WhatsApp, LINE, Meta Messenger, Apple Messages for Business and other platforms. It also provides the capabilities to collaborate within the seller teams using Slack. It also offers Zoom and Microsoft Teams integration to facilitate easy collaboration and connection among customers.
    • Customer Success: Freshworks provides a broader array of customer success resources tailored to both admins and end users. This includes customer success managers and technical account managers for large and complex deployments, as well as additional training through the Freshworks Academy, with the ability to interact with customer and product teams on features through the user community.
    Cautions
    • Market Responsiveness: The Freshsales suite continues to lag on product capabilities, compared to leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant. For example, many of the vendors possess native conversation intelligence features for audio, video collection and transcription. Freshworks makes this available only on integration with Gong, which is an additional cost to consider.
    • Vertical Strategy: Freshsales does not have a product offering geared toward specific vertical industries. Instead, Freshworks has enabled its AI tool, Freddy, to support limited, vertical-industry-driven data predictions built on historical sales and activity data. Freddy also uses vertical industry AI/ML models for contact scoring and predictions on new accounts. This is a consideration for sales organizations looking for deeper vertical-industry support.
    • Forecasting: Freshsales placed among the lowest tier of vendors for its support of forecasting capabilities. For example, it does not support predictive forecasting features, and only offers prediction at the deal level, without the ability to roll up into a predictive forecast. Furthermore, the solution only supports five forecast categories at most, inclusive of the standard setup of Committed or Best-Case. This poses limitations for larger sales organizations that are looking to go beyond three custom forecast categories (in addition to the standard categories of Committed and Best-Case).
    HubSpot
    HubSpot is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. HubSpot’s SFA product, Sales Hub, supports small and midsize deployments, and the vendor has most of its implementations in North America and Europe, although the vendor can and does support global deployments. AWS is HubSpot’s cloud service provider, and HubSpot maintains AWS infrastructure on the U.S. east coast and in Germany. Its industry presence includes high tech/software, professional services and manufacturing.
    HubSpot’s product releases over the last year included UI enhancements, data model improvements such as new native objects, easier creation of custom objects and a visual mapping tool built to support teams with complex data models. On HubSpot’s roadmap are deeper integrations with LinkedIn, a prospecting workspace tailored to business development and sales development reps, and intelligent deal management capabilities to support pipeline and health performance reporting.
    Strengths
    • Out-of-the-Box Integrations: HubSpot has an applications marketplace of approximately 1,400 integrations as of March 2023, which includes over 550 applications in the sales category. While some of these integrations have been built by HubSpot, most have been developed by over 1,100 authorized ISVs.
    • Scope of Native Capabilities: HubSpot was designated among the highest tier of vendors for providing an inclusive scope of native features and capabilities. For example, it includes features that would normally be considered add-on purchases in its Sales Professional, such as automated sequences for sales development reps, e-signature features, 1:1 video messaging, and suggested send times for prospecting.
    • Consent Management for Sellers: HubSpot includes General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) settings to help sales teams manage consent on features like meetings and add unsubscribe links to all emails. For recording calls with prospects and customers, HubSpot users are prompted with a notice to ensure consent before the call can be recorded.
    Cautions
    • Pricing and Contract Flexibility: HubSpot lags most vendors in this Magic Quadrant on its pricing and contract flexibility, according to their clients. Clients claim that it comes with a complex pricing structure, and HubSpot charges for training, which can be more expensive for complex scenarios where the free Academy content and certification resources aren’t applicable. This is a trade-off to consider between usability and cost.
    • Few Large-Enterprise Services: HubSpot sells best to small and midsize organizations, but lacks enterprise-level services, such as cloud solutions architects, to provide a unique and tailored enterprise experience. Furthermore, HubSpot placed lower than other vendors in this Magic Quadrant in providing an extensive ecosystem of value-added resellers and implementation partners, which is typically required for enterprise organizations.
    • Vertical AI Strategy: HubSpot does not currently offer vertical-specific AI/ML solutions; its approach is industry-agnostic and the machine learning is trained on the specific context of the account. This may pose limitations for organizations looking for more industry-specific AI/ML use cases that cater to their unique business processes.
    Microsoft
    Microsoft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its SFA product, Dynamics 365 Sales, is relevant for most B2B and B2C sales processes, but further configuration and customization is needed to support indirect channel sales. Its highest industry presence includes financial services, manufacturing, professional services and retail/consumer packaged goods (CPG). Recent enhancements to the product include the availability of Viva Sales (to be rebranded as Sales Copilot), included within the enterprise and premium edition of the SFA product package. This helps to improve productivity and data capture and retrieval between Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and its SFA product (which also supports Salesforce). It is further augmented with generative AI, for uses such as generating email replies and includes real-time insights on conversation intelligence, with meeting summary generation. The vendor’s roadmap promises additional investments into the forthcoming Sales Copilot product, specifically generative AI capabilities, such as AI-generated meeting prep, context-based content recommendations, advanced email personalization, Sales Copilot Search and proposal generation, to name a few.
    Strengths
    • Innovation: Microsoft is capitalizing on the push into generative AI with a very compelling roadmap, as highlighted above. These capabilities hold potential to be significant time savers for all sales users and sales organizations looking to take advantage of generative AI. Furthermore, it continues to invest in existing AI capabilities via real-time insight capture, enabling SMS as an SFA communication channel, and sales sequence effectiveness measurements.
    • Sales Productivity: Microsoft has a strong approach to addressing sales productivity challenges. For example, much of its product portfolio is geared toward capturing customer data into its SFA product, irrespective of which channel or application is used, while simultaneously surfacing insights. so that sellers spend less time logging data and more time focused on engaging in customer conversations. This is exemplified in its activity management functionality powered by Viva Sales (to be rebranded as Sales Copilot), its conversation intelligence capability, and sales sequence effectiveness reports in its Sales Accelerator product.
    • Customer-Centric Product Strategy: Microsoft prioritizes customer engagement in its product strategy, utilizing a myriad of channels for idea submission and feedback. Its comprehensive system of over five feedback loops integrates customer insights from inception to implementation, and allows users of their platform to have a voice in potential product releases.
    Cautions
    • Licensing and Cost Complexity: Customers have cited complaints about Microsoft’s complex licensing structure and product costs, especially considering that many of the changes made to its cost structures are partner/reseller managed. Obtaining more value within the SFA product to support modern selling requires buying into more Microsoft products, such as the ability to use Power Virtual Agents to enable chatbot-executed sales workflows or initiate customer conversations in self-service.
    • User Interface/Usability: Based on client feedback collected through Gartner inquiry and Peer Insights, Microsoft’s desktop and mobile versions of its SFA product received complaints about usability. These complaints include a steep learning curve for admins and an unfriendly UI, with some saying that it is difficult to navigate and needs simplification.
    • Visualization and Analytics: Microsoft’s out-of-the-box analytics features for its SFA product are weak, with less than a handful of default dashboard variations included for each role (seller, manager and leadership). Sales organizations will find themselves needing to upgrade to Power BI for broader and deeper visualization and analytics capabilities.
    Neocrm
    Neocrm is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Neocrm’s customer base is predominantly in China, although it is beginning to expand deployments outside of the region. The vendor covers sales organizations of all sizes, tending toward customers with more than 1,000 employees. Its top vertical segments are manufacturing, technology, professional services and CPG industries, and has an automotive-industry edition of its application. Most of its implementations are primarily in the Tencent Cloud infrastructure as a service, with AWS also supported. During the past year, it has enhanced its user interface platform across all devices, improved the NeoBI capability that provides rich analytics and dashboarding, and has further developed its configuration and pricing tools. Neocrm plans to integrate digital sales rooms and self-service portals in concert with Tencent’s WeCom. It expects to incorporate more advanced AI to enrich customer intelligence and accelerate value message creation.
    Strengths
    • Mobile Support: Neocrm caters to the preferences of Asian consumers by enabling mobile interactions for full B2B and B2C collaboration, consumer engagement and channel plays for all sales models. The vendor supports and extends digitization and remote sales interaction across all market segments, through its alliances with WeCom/WeChat and Tencent meetings. All interactions are stored in the SFA platform, and further insights are extracted through its native conversation intelligence capabilities.
    • Visualization and Analytics: Neocrm enhanced its support of visualization and analytics, making it stand out against Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. It provides a full suite of chart and analytics types with data-driven text callouts, includes internal and external data sources, and provides the ability to do extensive win/loss analysis customizations.
    • Collaboration: Neocrm has strengths in collaboration internally and with customers and partners. Neocrm integrates the WeCom enterprise communication platform, allowing fast business transactions for its sellers and customers, particularly on mobile platforms. It also brings meeting and activity signals into its NeoSuggest functionality to provide guided selling nudges. Users can now add BI reports, workbooks and data sources to collaboration groups through NeoBI shared space.
    Cautions
    • AI/ML: Neocrm’s component scoring (e.g., account, opportunity) and forecasting functions mostly use manual rule sets and triggers set by the admin, not based on machine learning techniques. Customers should clarify the extent of the AI/ML capability and its predictive functionality in Neocrm’s current release, and the setup and maintenance effort required to leverage the technology.
    • Limited Global Support: Global customers with multiple usage locations across continents should seek to understand Neocrm’s capability to support their needs outside its home region, where its customers are predominantly placed. Much of Neocrm’s support resources are centralized in Asia/Pacific, in countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
    • Quality of Recent Releases: In terms of significant new functionality, Neocrm’s recent releases in the past year placed among the lowest tier of vendors. The releases were mostly moderate-to low-level functionality improvements, such as support for products from multiple price books, enhancements to the workflow engine and a WeChat portal for channel partners to process orders, check promotions and obtain information within WeChat. However, it did release a new UI development platform to improve the user and platform experience and flexibility.
    Oracle
    Oracle is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Part of the Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle Sales is well-suited for mostly midsize and large enterprise deployments, although it can support the small and midsize business (SMB) segment through its NetSuite product portfolio (not evaluated here). Its core SFA solution is optimized for multiple industries, and it also sells prepackaged SFA applications for the communications and utilities industries. Most recent enhancements as of March 2023 include guided selling cadences for support of event-based sales process triggers, NLP analysis of meeting notes with contact recommendations, automated proposal generation and AI-augmented similar-account analysis. Its roadmap promises generative AI features such as natural language querying and external data intelligence gathering, and a Buyer 360 feature that allows for cross-application visibility. Its roadmap also includes an enhanced assisted-buyer feature, which will allow sales representatives to seamlessly assist multiple customers, using everything from chat-based assistance to real-time human guidance.
    Strengths
    • Innovation: Oracle placed among the highest tier of vendors for its recent releases. For example, it released sales engagement features to support cadences and dynamic sales guidance. Additionally, it has introduced an AI-augmented and configurable similar-account-analysis model, which allows sales organizations to identify similar accounts based on attributes such as industry, address or company size.
    • Mobile, Devices and Bots: Oracle possesses strong capabilities in this area, most notably showcasing versatility by seamlessly executing sales processes on mobile and on devices such smartwatches and virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa. It also includes a bot assistant on its mobile device, allowing for a natural-language conversation to create, update and read SFA records.
    • Market Responsiveness: Relative to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Oracle released a large number of meaningful capabilities and usability improvements in the last year. This includes similar-account analysis, bidirectional appointment syncing with Microsoft 365 and a predictions framework tool that enables customers to build their own AI/ML models.
    Cautions
    • Sales Role Strategy: Sales organizations may find it difficult to realize the value of Oracle Sales products, as Oracle cross-sells heavily to the technical buyer at customers of back-office Oracle products. Their strategy on positioning Oracle Sales to the chief sales officer is less clear, which can make it more difficult for sales organizations to see the value of the product.
    • Vertical AI Strategy: The AI/ML features of Oracle Sales offer no specialization or tailoring for individual industries. Customers in industries with specialized AI requirements will have to configure Oracle Sales to reflect the nuances of their specific industries.
    • Customer Success Management: Compared to leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Oracle lacks a comprehensive program within its customer success management organization for addressing client challenges. For example, it indicates that client needs are addressed on a case-by-case basis, with a focus on outcome-based success criteria. This is a consideration for sales organizations looking for a broad and deep customer success program with an explicit structure for addressing pain points.
    Pega
    Pega is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. The Pega Sales Automation product is more suited toward large and global enterprises, with functionality tailored for key industry verticals, including insurance, financial services and healthcare. Pega’s conversation intelligence and guided selling features help to automate and streamline seller activities, while offering managers visibility into sales execution. Recent product enhancements include relationship mapping features to provide opportunity-level and account-level views of contacts, sales cadences for guided selling on lead management workflow, and an enhanced mobile experience. Its roadmap promises generative-AI-driven enhancements, such as email responses, meeting summaries and task execution, and insights-based sales dashboards.
    Strengths
    • Vertical Strategy: Pega offers multiple vertical-specific SFA products for customers in the insurance, healthcare, financial services and statutory health industries. Pega offers more AI/ML functionality that is specifically tailored for select industries than any other vendor in this Magic Quadrant, including healthcare, telecommunications, insurance and financial services.
    • Lead Management: Pega placed among the highest tier of vendors for lead management capabilities. It possesses some robust features for managing the presales process, namely for SDRs and BDRs. For example, the product can balance workloads, distributing leads based on a pool of recipients to actively manage the workload. Furthermore, its ML applies lead scoring in real time, through event-driven activities such as behaviors, communication or any new data clients deem significant. This allows for more seamless prioritization and improved decision intelligence.
    • Product Strategy: Pega offers a rich portfolio of critical capabilities that are native to its core product, compared to other SFA vendors. Pega supports a range of deployment options, including on-premises and hosted private cloud that will resonate with customers who have specific implementation requirements, or data residency and compliance needs.
    Cautions
    • Customer Success Strategy: Pega provides its customers with self-service online learning, peer networking, a knowledge base portal (the Pega Discovery Network) and a customer service forum. However, they do not offer industry-specific support networks or tools, and their customer success teams are structured by geography, without any industry alignment or specialization.
    • Rate of Improvement: Pega introduced among the fewest capabilities in the past year, compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. The number of Pega product enhancements driven by customer feedback was also relatively low. Pega’s reported releases this evaluation period were relatively low comparatively, and many were repeats of last year’s releases, with no major SFA releases.
    • Sales Strategy: Pega targets large and global enterprise customers and does not actively sell to the small or midmarket business sectors. Additionally, Pega does not have a clear strategy for selling to business decision makers. Their messaging and sales motions are tailored to the IT leader. Sales organizations may find limitations with securing business-friendly talent resources who are well-versed in maximizing Pega’s products and architecture for sales-specific use cases.
    Salesforce
    Salesforce is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its SFA product, Salesforce Sales Cloud, is well-suited for all use cases, including B2B, B2C and indirect channel sales. Recent enhancements to its product portfolio include a revenue insights dashboard for sales customers who do not use forecasting, as well as enhancements to collaborative forecasting, such as support for custom calculated columns and customizable forecast pages. Another recent addition is the ability to differentiate between new and recurring renewals when conducting a forecast. The roadmap includes the release of Sales GPT, which embeds generative AI capabilities, allowing for the creation of personalized email content, call summaries, and acting as a sales assistant in the flow of work. Additionally, the roadmap promises the release of Einstein Bots for Sales to automate lead qualification, scheduling and lead routing. Also planned for the future is Slack Sales Elevate, a native integration between Sales Cloud and Slack, which allows teams to work on opportunities, stay informed with alerts and automate sales workflows within the Slack interface.
    Strengths
    • Partner Relationship Management (PRM): Salesforce possesses strong indirect channel sales capabilities. It enables full partner-led sales cycles, ranging from deal registration and lead distribution all the way through to industry-specific data model support. To augment these, Salesforce also allows their Revenue Cloud (CPQ + billing) solution to be extended to partners for self-service CPQ.
    • Product Portfolio and Ecosystem: Salesforce was designated among the highest tier of vendors for its market strategy. It possesses a unique ability to apply its Sales Cloud solutions to multiple customer segments, ranging from small business to global conglomerates. Furthermore, it also combines vertical industry expertise through its 13 industry clouds, and it supports a breadth of revenue model types, including recurring-revenue models. This is combined with an expansive third-party marketplace (AppExchange) for add-on solutions, with over 5,000 apps and more than 2,000 partners, even in areas that overlap with native Salesforce functionality.
    • Customer Community and Success: Salesforce has a strong customer community and success organization, relative to other vendors. The depth of content available on its Trailhead education hub for continuous learning and development is a significant value driver for customers looking to improve their familiarity with the platform and upskill or reskill their sales organization. Also notable is Salesblazer, which was not yet live at the time of this evaluation. This community brings together sales-specific experts, content and sales professionals. It will be an attractive option for sales organizations looking to connect with and learn from professionals and experts in the same domain.
    Cautions
    • Pricing and Packaging: Gartner has fielded increasing complaints from clients, most recently about Salesforce increasing prices on renewal, with a mandatory 5% uplift often proposed by their sales organization and unexpected by clients. Salesforce has also introduced another new product packaging called Sales Suite, which includes all Sales-related products in a $600-per-user-per-month list price. Gartner believes this makes it tougher to differentiate its already difficult-to-navigate product packaging from other available variations, such as core SFA editions, bundled SFA with Service Cloud editions and industries-based packaging.
    • Platform Complexity: Salesforce clients have complained to Gartner about the steep learning curve required to become fully familiar with Salesforce’s platform and Sales Cloud product, often citing needing specialized resources, with long implementation times.
    • Mobile, IoT and Bots: Compared to leading vendors, Salesforce placed lower on capabilities supporting mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and bots. It currently does not support any virtual-assistant IoT device to execute sales workflows, such as through a smartwatch, Amazon Alexa or others. Furthermore, it currently has limited bot-building capabilities for sales use cases such as for prospecting, although that is on the roadmap to be released later this year. However, it will only support automated lead qualification, lead routing and appointment scheduling, which poses limitations for sales organizations looking to use it for more advanced sales use cases.
    SAP
    SAP is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. SAP Sales Cloud is commonly deployed by larger B2B and B2C organizations that have deployed SAP’s ERP. SAP is well-suited for the CPG, wholesale, high-tech/software, manufacturing and professional-services industries. SAP has transformed its CRM technology into a modern, API-first, microservices-based architecture with built-in AI. SAP’s recent enhancements include activity insights, its playbook effectiveness and ML-based predictive opportunity close dates, and has improved its field visit intelligence based on sales insights. SAP is planning to enhance its guided selling capabilities by adding ML-based intelligent recommendations and subscription selling. SAP’s roadmap also lists omnichannel sales engagement, with real-time, AI-driven coaching and sales cadence management as a further important planned enhancement. SAP continues to focus on AI-based technologies and customer feedback.
    Strengths
    • Market Understanding: With its prebuilt Microsoft Teams integration, SAP demonstrates its understanding of the market’s need to address modern sales challenges by improving buyer engagement. It also supports omnichannel sales engagement capabilities with real-time deal coaching and cadences.
    • Complex Use Cases: SAP is a good fit for organizations with many products, complex sales processes and multiple sales teams, enabling them to manage everything in one place. It supports account and contact creation from different channels, such as email engagements, calls and call list execution, sales live chat, and through digital collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, which is preconfigured. It also features a dynamic playbook function that includes integrated scenarios, such as those that use commerce and web to integrate leads into account and contact.
    • AI at No Extra Charge: Artificial intelligence capabilities (excluding generative AI) are included in the SAP Sales Cloud license. There are no extra costs associated with ML or other AI-related functionalities. This allows customers to take advantage of more automated capabilities — for example, intelligent (ML) scoring mechanisms, which are included in the SAP Sales Cloud offering.
    Cautions
    • Recent Product Releases: Unlike other vendors assessed in this Magic Quadrant, in the past 12 months SAP has introduced incremental new functionalities, such as enhancements to user experience, improvements in document references, and enhancements in field sales execution. No notable major releases were made for the SFA product. SAP has limited capabilities for automation, such as bad or incomplete data-quality-detection capabilities, or more predictive and prescriptive features for scoring.
    • Customer Centricity: SAP’s ability to demonstrate adjustments to changing customer needs is slower compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. While SAP aspires to be a customer-centric company, to date, Gartner has yet to see these improvements in discussions with SAP’s clients. SAP clients report that meaningful interactions with the company are hard to obtain, as SAP comes with limited strategies and tactics for achieving a trusted level of personalization with its customers. Gartner has not yet heard from customers about the enhanced quality of SAP’s customer experience.
    • Marketing Execution: Marketing activities for SAP Sales Cloud are typically targeted to existing SAP customers. SAP’s competitors in the CRM market have a stronger social media presence and more diversified marketing activities. With limited visibility, customers may find it difficult to determine the market perception and conduct a comparison to other vendors on SAP’s sales cloud product and services.
    SugarCRM
    SugarCRM is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its SFA solution, Sugar Sell, is often targeted at the B2B upper midmarket, though the vendor does sell to B2C and enterprise customers. SugarCRM supports all industries and offers industry-specific templates for manufacturing, high tech, financial services and professional services. During the past year, SugarCRM has launched a modernized UI across the platform and added pipeline inspection features. In addition, SugarCRM has enhanced its territory mapping features, forecasting capabilities, and DocuSign integrations. Sugar Hint, their relationship intelligence capability, and Sugar Automate, their guided selling capability, have been built into the core product, easing administration. SugarCRM’s roadmap includes richer integration with Outlook and Gmail, a Kanban UI to improve opportunity management and usability for sellers and managers, AI-based predictive forecasting, and expanded no-code administration features. SugarCRM also plans to introduce generative AI and digital engagement capabilities in the coming year.
    Strengths
    • Implementation Services: SugarCRM differentiates itself with a broad scope of implementation services, supported by three professional service teams specialized for integrations, data migration and change management. It supports customers with an ongoing relationship with their professional services team through its Sugar Care program, which is available as a one-off engagement and through subscription-based service contracts.
    • Customer Success Strategy: Sugar provides an adoption framework to ensure that clients maximize their investment in the SFA product by addressing change management. It also boasts a comprehensive customer success program, which clients can access once onboarded. Besides live classroom delivery, it also provides e-learning and tutorials.
    • Sales Strategy: SugarCRM possesses strength in selling to business decision makers, using prebuilt solutions for common industries and business processes. SugarCRM expanded its channel partner coverage by adding approximately 50 new partners and increasing its Latin America presence.
    Cautions
    • Product Strategy: Sugar’s product strategy lags leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant. For example, it still does not possess ML-based, next-best-action recommendations, since much of what drives its guided selling are rule-based static values. Furthermore, it has only recently announced predictive forecasting capabilities on its upcoming roadmap. These capabilities have been present in leading vendors for over two years.
    • Market Responsiveness: SugarCRM placed among the lower tier of vendors on quality of product enhancements delivered in the past year. While the vendor made improvements to existing features and usability, they did not deliver any new major product capabilities.
    • Sales Playbooks: SugarCRM does not include a playbook builder or templated, guided selling functionality in its base product package. This is a standard and included feature in all SFA platform products in this Magic Quadrant, and is only available within the company’s Sugar Sell Premier edition, starting at $135 per user per month. It can also be obtained as an add-on product in its midtier edition, the Enterprise edition, which lists for $85 per user per month.
    Vtiger
    Vtiger is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, named Vtiger One, is best-suited for the SMB segment. Serving B2B and B2C, it also supports channel sales features. It has a construction industry vertical edition, and supported use cases for the financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical and real-estate industries. In the past year, Vtiger introduced a new edition, which notably added CPQ, opportunity revenue schedules and a learning management system for sales learning. The new edition also includes improvements to its Insights Designer and Process Designer, and a GPT (generative AI) booster for its Calculus AI add-on, which allows for email subject generation, email generation and querying. It plans to enhance the GPT integration with more use cases, and will also introduce a conversational sales bot, a drag-and-drop page builder capability, and CPQ features.
    Strengths
    • SMB Market Strategy: Vtiger offers a self-signup, always-free edition as a solid offering for small businesses starting a CRM journey, with a pathway to fee-based Professional and Enterprise editions for businesses growing in CRM maturity.
    • Functionality: Vtiger offers helpful features for the SMB segment, such as activity and opportunity management, where sales users can interact via multiple communication channels with buyers, capture interaction data and autoscore contact engagement levels. Multiple sales processes can be applied for different business flows, with the embedded CPQ adding value to users of their product.
    • Buyer Engagement: With the addition of a digital sales room product, content integration and CPQ tools, Vtiger offers additional digitization of key sales motions and enhancements to the buyer experience.
    Cautions
    • Fees for AI/ML Functionality: Sales organizations seeking advanced AI/ML functions must pay additional license fees if they want to enable Calculus AI or generative AI capabilities, using Booster Packs. Users can also pay an add-on monthly user fee via a consumption-based model once Booster Pack tokens are depleted. This is a consideration for smaller organizations who want to partake in innovative AI capabilities, but may not have an expansive budget.
    • Forecast Management: Sales organizations will find Vtiger’s forecast management, predictive analytics and pipeline inspection functions for managing accuracy to be less advanced than those of leading vendors. For example, users are unable to do forecast splits without custom configuration or development. Features for what-if modeling and scenario-based forecast adjustment are lacking, leaving dashboards to identify and inspect opportunity record issues.
    • Customer Success: Sales organizations that require deep product support processes and continuous learning and development may find VTiger’s overall postsales program relatively lacking. For example, most of the continuous learning and development to support the customer journey is conducted via newsletters and webinars, with no expansive workshops, personalized approaches or structured program for postsale success.
    Zoho
    Zoho is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. Zoho CRM is well-suited to support sales organizations of all sizes and segments; however, Zoho is more prevalent in SMB and midsize organizations, with emphasis in the technology, professional services, financial services, real estate and retail industries. Enhancements have been made to the product’s call transcriptions, emotion AI analysis and to Zoho’s AI assistant, Zia, which now offers better recommendations, churn predictions and customer journey tracking. Upcoming plans include the implementation of integrated ChatGPT prompts for better sales email generation and note-taking efficiency, use of customer and stakeholder data for forecasting, and a new module for partner life cycle management.
    Strengths
    • Native Product Strategy: Zoho has a good native product strategy, as it provides over 50 native products in its portfolio. At a compelling $14 per-user-per-month (pupm) entry point for the lowest-priced edition to, $40 pupm for its entry Enterprise Edition package, its pricing allows sales organizations that want to centralize on a single-vendor stack without a high price point to kickstart their deployments. This is especially helpful when looking to pilot a small set of features.
    • Customer Community: Zoho has a strong customer community of users. This community is supported by the vendor, which encourages active participation and connections through its SuperBud program, which provides rewards and recognitions. It also organizes communities based on interests or vertical industries
    • Market Responsiveness: Zoho has delivered quality enhancements in the last year, including a CPQ engine and churn prediction, as well as emotion and sentiment analysis. Notably, it has also delivered frequent enhancements to user experience through its Canvas UI designer, by enabling reusable UI components and shareable UI templates.
    Cautions
    • Marketplace: Zoho has a small, independent, third-party service provider presence for sales, with only slightly over 100 sales-specific add-ons available from Zoho partners. Sales organizations seeking to diversify their Zoho SFA stack will find limited options available relative to leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
    • Integration Challenges: While Zoho offers a number of integrations with first-party and third-party software, some Gartner clients complained that third-party integrations were difficult to implement, especially with non-Zoho applications.
    • Forecasting: Zoho CRM lacks the depth of forecast capabilities offered by Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, such as what-if analysis, changes to user-submitted forecasts (needs configuration), and prescriptive analytics. Furthermore, it also lacks the ability to create custom forecast periods and hierarchies, which are role- and territory-based only.

    Vendors Added and Dropped

    We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

    Added

    No vendors were added to this Magic Quadrant.

    Dropped

    Zendesk was dropped from this Magic Quadrant because it did not meet the criteria for inclusion.

    Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

    For Gartner clients, Magic Quadrant research identifies and then analyzes the most-relevant providers and their products in a market. By default, Gartner uses an upper limit of 20 vendors to support the identification of the most-relevant providers in a market. Occasionally, Gartner may extend the upper limit, in situations where the intended research value to our clients might otherwise be diminished. The inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes that analysts believe are necessary for inclusion in this research.

    Level 1

    To qualify for inclusion in the 2023 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, vendors were required to meet eight of the following nine criteria:
    • Account/Contact Management, Activity Management, Opportunity Management: Serve as a system of record for account and contact management; sales activity management; and opportunity management. Vendor should also be able to natively support systems of engagement for capturing and facilitating sales and customer interactions, tasks and activities.
    • Pipeline Management: Serve as a system of record for sales and support sales-customer engagement journeys through channel-agnostic interactions, including web portal (self-service), SMS, chat, and email at minimum. Vendor should also support predictive and/or prescriptive analytics for pipeline management. (Must include all three.)
    • Forecast Management: Serve as a system of record and system of insights for capturing, auditing and recording forecasting processes, and be able to demonstrate the ability to automate the forecasting process.
    • Lead Management: Serve as a system of record for lead management capabilities, which includes functions for lead nurturing, lead conversion tracking and lead attribution analysis.
    • Guided Selling: Provide guided selling capabilities in the form of formal sales playbooks and rule-based recommendations that align with sales playbooks.
    • Provide a platform for extending sales processes with custom user interfaces, custom data objects, custom data fields and custom workflows, including (but not limited to) building engagement support with a diverse set of channel interactions.
    • Provide a platform for extending sales processes into customer interaction channels for buyer-seller engagement support in at least four core channels, namely, web portal (self-service), SMS, chat and email.
    • Provide native, open APIs that allow the solution to integrate with third-party applications, such as (but not limited to) ERP systems, BI tools, unified communication tools or other applications that may be deemed relevant to a selling organization.
    • Provide mobile and device capabilities, whereby sellers and their managers can manage their primary daily sales from either a natively-provided mobile application, mobile web browser or IoT device. Sellers and managers must also be supported by a low-code mobile application development SDK (for mobile apps). Native applications should work without the internet or offline.

    Level 2

    Vendors that met these Level 1 criteria were then required to meet both of the following criteria to qualify:
    • Have customers with live SFA implementations in at least two of the three use cases for Sales Force Automation Platform critical capabilities: B2B sales, B2C sales and indirect/relationship sales.
    • Make at least two major CRM SFA releases with significant functional improvements during the 12 months from 1 March 2022 to 16 March 2023. A new or acquired offering from an established provider in this market is also considered, if Gartner established that offering was being sold to customers.

    Level 3

    If vendors met Level 2 criteria, they were then required to meet at least four of the following five criteria:
    • Provide native PRM capabilities. To qualify for this criterion, providers must offer a portal-user license type, offer portal management capabilities for partners to manage leads and opportunities assigned to them, and offer partner life cycle management capabilities. All three criteria must be satisfied to qualify for this category of evaluation.
    • At least 50 customers with live SFA platform implementations as of 1 February 2022, spanning at least four industries, in accordance with industry definitions established by Gartner, listed in the Evaluation Criteria section below.
    • Must have an average number of SFA paid users (neither partner users nor freemium users) per customer (not org/instance) of at least 25 users as of 1 February 2022.
    • Revenue from SFA platform sales of at least $14 million during the calendar year 2022.
    • During the 12 months from 1 February 2022 to 16 March 2023, closed SFA contracts with at least 18 new logos (not new contracts sold to an existing client) on deals that exceed $750,000 in total contract value. Alternatively, vendors may have closed SFA contracts with at least 50 new logos on deals from $50,000 to $750,000 in total contract value.

    Evaluation Criteria

    Ability to Execute

    In terms of capabilities, sales organizations require different levels of depth and complexity. Vendors that support a wide range of complexity have greater market potential, and are positioned accordingly. Because this is a cross-industry Magic Quadrant, evaluation of a provider’s offering is focused on the ability to serve several broad industry sectors, not to provide industry-specific solutions.
    Product or Service: This criterion looks at core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market. Vendors are evaluated on the quality of their native SFA capabilities, including both the core capabilities and SFA extensions. Vendors are also evaluated on technical considerations, such as ease of use and administrative functions. Gartner assesses information provided from the Gartner Peer Insights data, as well as other, publicly available sources, from the Critical Capabilities research and from observations collected from Gartner inquiries.
    Overall Viability: This is an assessment of the organization’s overall financial health, as well as the financial and practical success of the business unit. We consider the likelihood of the organization continuing to offer and invest in the product, as well as the product position in the current portfolio.
    Vendors will be evaluated on additional factors, such as customer retention rate, and their ability to generate revenue specifically in the SFA market.
    Sales Execution/Pricing: This includes an organization’s capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. It considers deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. The vendor must provide global sales and distribution coverage that aligns with its marketing messages. It must have specific experience and success selling SFA applications to sales buying centers (i.e., the VP of sales or sales operations) and to application leaders. Among the many factors in this category, Gartner evaluates the number of new customers acquired, growth in SFA revenue, average SFA deal size, average contract duration and customer retention. Gartner also evaluates clients’ satisfaction with contracting and negotiation processes.
    Market Responsiveness and Track Record: This criterion considers a vendor’s ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. We also consider the vendor’s history of responsiveness to changing market demands. Gartner evaluates the quality and depth of the vendor’s releases, and the ability to release functions requested by clients.
    Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization’s message to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and establish a positive identification in the minds of customers. This “mind share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional, thought leadership, social media, referrals and sales activities.
    Gartner will measure the frequency and quality of the vendor’s marketing techniques, including its use of publicity promotions, and thought leadership in social channels or print publications. Gartner will also evaluate the vendor’s presence on the shortlists of Gartner’s clients and the scope of available third-party solutions.
    Customer Experience: This criterion considers products and services and/or programs that enable customers to achieve anticipated results with the products evaluated — specifically, quality supplier/buyer interactions, technical support or account support. This may also include ancillary tools, customer support programs, availability of user groups and service-level agreements (SLAs). Feedback from active customers on generally available releases during the past 12 to 18 months is an important consideration. Sources of feedback include Gartner client inquiries and other customer-facing interactions, such as Gartner conferences, Peer Insights and research surveys. Customer experiences are evaluated based on the vendor’s ability to help customers achieve positive business value, as well as sustained user adoption, quality implementation and ongoing support.
    Operations: The ability of the organization to meet goals and commitments.

    Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

    Enlarge Table
    Evaluation CriteriaWeighting
    Product or Service
    High
    Overall Viability
    Medium
    Sales Execution/Pricing
    High
    Market Responsiveness/Record
    High
    Marketing Execution
    Low
    Customer Experience
    High
    Operations
    Medium
    Source: Gartner (March 2023)

    Completeness of Vision

    Gartner evaluates vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces, as well as how well these statements map to Gartner’s view of the market.
    Market Understanding: This includes the ability to understand customer needs and translate them into products and services. Vendors that show a clear vision for their market listen, understand customer demands, and can shape or enhance market changes with this. Vendors must define how their SFA solutions improve clients’ sales process execution and support sales effectiveness objectives. Vendors must also define their competitive differentiators, value proposition and the outcomes achieved by their clients. Vendors are also evaluated on their articulated and demonstrated ability to align with clients’ customer experience, digital business and sales execution optimization objectives.
    Marketing Strategy: In this category, we look for clear, differentiated messaging that is consistently communicated internally and externalized through social media, advertising, partner programs, systems integrators (SIs), customer programs and positioning statements. Vendors are evaluated on their segmentation strategies and how their solutions appeal to selling organizations in multiple verticals, as well as prospects with 50 or more sales sellers. If the vendor derives a significant percentage of its revenue from recurring revenue-based products, it must also have a customer retention strategy.
    Sales Strategy: In this category, we look primarily for a sound selling strategy that uses the appropriate direct/indirect sales strategy, as well as partners that extend the scope and depth of market reach, expertise, technologies, services and customer base. Vendors are evaluated on their ability to sell to both business and IT stakeholders, as well as to the segments defined in the marketing strategy.
    Offering (Product) Strategy: This category includes the vendor’s approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes market differentiation, functionality, methodology and features, as they map to current and future requirements. Gartner assesses the vendor’s product and packaging offerings. The vendor should not only demonstrate a product vision that accounts for core SFA functionality (as defined by the market’s core capabilities), but also one that offers new application functionality across the breadth and depth of product capabilities. The latter consideration is critical for meeting the needs of a maturing market.
    Subcapabilities include the vendor’s vision for:
    • Sales enablement capabilities, such as content management, sales training and coaching
    • B2B and B2C digital commerce
    • Digital sales rooms
    • Sales effectiveness capabilities (e.g., CPQ or order management)
    • Integration with third-party sales applications, although primary focus is on native capabilities
    Business Model: In this category, we look for how the design, logic and execution of the organization’s business proposition helps it achieve continued success. Vendors need to have clear business plans for how they will be successful in the SFA market. These business plans should include appropriate levels of investment to achieve profitability and healthy revenue growth during a three- to five-year period. Sales channels and partnership strategies are important components.
    Vertical/Industry Strategy: In this category, we look for how the vendor deploys products to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals. Vendors will be evaluated on the scope of native-built applications that automate industry-specific sales processes in verticals such as financial services and life sciences. Vendors will also be evaluated on the scope of third-party partnerships with ISVs that offer industry-specific capabilities.
    Innovation: This concerns direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or preemptive purposes. Vendors are evaluated on the quality of their enhancements and product releases. Vendors must show continued investment in improving core SFA capabilities. They must also show growth in new areas such as improving sales execution, analytics, collaboration or new devices such as IoT; or new technology directions, such as digital business and bot-building capabilities to support multiexperience.
    Geographic Strategy: We look at the vendor’s strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the “home” or native geography. This can be direct or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market. Vendors will be evaluated on the percentage of employees allocated to the regions, as well as the depth and scope of partners available in those regions.

    Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

    Enlarge Table
    Evaluation CriteriaWeighting
    Market Understanding
    High
    Marketing Strategy
    Medium
    Sales Strategy
    Medium
    Offering (Product) Strategy
    High
    Business Model
    Low
    Vertical/Industry Strategy
    Medium
    Innovation
    High
    Geographic Strategy
    Medium
    Source: Gartner (March 2023)

    Quadrant Descriptions

    Leaders

    Leaders have the ability to execute their vision through products, services and demonstrably solid business results, in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful worldwide customer deployments in a wide variety of industries, and with multiple proof points for deployments above 500 users. They demonstrate consistently above-average CX levels, product execution scores and sales execution scores.
    They demonstrate product leadership, delivering new enhancements and innovations on a consistent schedule. They also provide thought leadership, showing customers and prospects how their SFA solutions improve sales execution and sales processes.

    Challengers

    Challengers are often larger than most (but not all) Niche Players, and demonstrate a higher volume of new business for SFA. They have the size to compete worldwide; however, in some cases, they may not be able to execute equally well in all geographies or segments. They often return stronger CX satisfaction scores. They understand the evolving needs of a sales organization, yet may not lead customers into new functional areas with a strong functional vision.
    Challengers tend to have a good technology vision for architecture and other IT organizational considerations, but have not won over the top sales executives and/or application leaders in the IT organization.

    Visionaries

    Visionaries are ahead of most potential competitors in delivering innovative products and/or delivery models. They anticipate emerging and changing sales needs, and move the market into fresh areas with solutions that improve sales execution.
    Visionaries have strong potential to influence the direction of the SFA market, but are limited in terms of execution and/or track record.

    Niche Players

    Niche Players offer products for SFA functionality, but may lack some functional components. Some may not show the ability to consistently handle deployments of more than 500 users across multiple geographies. Some may lack strong business execution in the SFA market, even if they have strong critical capabilities. These vendors may offer complete portfolios for a specific industry, but face challenges in one or more areas necessary to support cross-industry requirements, such as complex forecasting and pricing and quotation features. They may have an inconsistent implementation track record, or they may lack the ability to support the requirements of large enterprises.
    Niche Players often offer the best solutions for the needs of particular sales organizations or sales use cases.

    Context

    Given that there are more than 75 SFA vendors worldwide, the vendors in this research are a small part of the overall SFA vendor market. Hundreds more vendors provide basic contact management software, which is a subset of SFA. Dozens of vendors have built vertical-specific SFA solutions.
    Because it is not possible to review every SFA provider, this Magic Quadrant evaluates SFA solutions that are broadly applicable to many differently sized sales organizations and verticals.
    We place particular emphasis on vendors’ core SFA capabilities, as described in the Market Definition/Description section of this Magic Quadrant. However, for the purpose of building as complete a picture as possible, we also evaluate their noncore SFA capabilities, such as sales engagement and sales enablement functionality.
    SFA means different things to different types of sales organizations:
    • Product-driven, transactional sales organizations, such as those with short-cycle B2B sales, value its basic lead and opportunity management capabilities to reduce sales cycles and improve sales management visibility.
    • Product and service organizations selling enterprisewide deals, such as long-cycle B2B sales organizations, value account management and forecasting capabilities. These organizations often also value lead management, CPQ and sales content management systems. They often tie together proposals, bids, configurations and quotes with authorizations and order capture systems. Organizations operating in this space require granular forecasting and pipeline management features.
    • Organizations engaged in relationship selling require SFA tools to manage their customer and prospect data, but also require sales enablement tools for content distribution and sales activity capture.
    • Organizations that sell via indirect sales channels require PRM capabilities.

    Sales Organization Sizing

    In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner refers to sales organization customer sizes or vendor target segments. We define these segments as follows:
    • Small business — fewer than 100 sales users
    • Midsize enterprise (MSE) or business — 101 to 1,000 sales users
    • Large business — 1,001 to 2,500 sales users
    • Enterprise-size — more than 2,500 sales users

    Market Overview

    The SFA market grew 14.4% to an estimated $10.7 billion in 2022. Gartner continues to facilitate a large number of inquiries surrounding vendors and their capabilities. Most notably, these inquiries involve clients revisiting their SFA investments/deployments to assess alternatives in the market, or out of the need to support a unified CX strategy and digital transformation efforts within organizations.
    Gartner clients are questioning the value of their SFA investments and deployments, which are often symptoms of SFA solutions never being aligned to sales business objectives and measured appropriately, data quality challenges, poor governance structures, and usability implementations. These lead to poor user adoption. Moreover, an increasing number of clients were also seeking best practices for implementation, which suggests SFA vendors may not be adequately supporting clients in maximizing the value of their contracted relationship. This could also suggest that the client may not have adequate resources and the skill set to manage the implementation. The third trend is one of understanding AI sales use cases, and improving data intelligence and insight gathering for improved lead and pipeline visibility and forecast predictability.
    Gartner inquiries show clients:
    • Question SFA investment value — attributed to misalignment of sales business objectives with poor data quality and governance.
    • Found poor usability in implementations, leading to poor adoption.
    • Seek implementation best practices, resulting from inadequate resources for deployment support and subpar skill sets.
    • Lack an understanding of AI sales use cases to improve data intelligence and insight for improved lead and pipeline visibility, as well as greater forecast predictability.

    The Rise of Generative AI Will Lead to New Sales Use Cases, Improve Usability and Increase Value Attainment

    This could lead to an opportunity for technologies like generative AI to address the challenges of usability, data quality and enrichment, and an improved understanding of practical sales AI use cases. For example, generative AI promises to support improved data collection, intelligence gathering and synthesizing, process automation, and planning, which leads to improved usability supported by conversational interfaces. (See Multidimensional CRM: How GenAI Will Revolutionize Sales Force Automation Platforms.)
    Gartner expects SFA vendors to significantly reprioritize their roadmaps to focus on generative AI capabilities. This ability to absolve some of the challenges plaguing sales organizations for the last decade and beyond will make for a compelling value proposition. For example, to help with data quality challenges, generative AI solutions will be able to detect and rectify data inconsistencies, streamlining the data cleansing processes. They may even go so far as to retrieve missing data and fill in the gaps. This is largely dependent on the way the SFA system is integrated with dependent source systems, so that it is able to make data retrieval calls. Similarly, prompt engineering control shaped by vendors will also determine how users interact with SFA platforms, and which process automation capabilities will be permitted.
    Further SFA implementation support will come in the way of generative AI bridging the gap with low-code, no-code approaches using prompt-based integration, workflow and business logic execution. This will help improve the time to value with SFA platforms, while minimizing the time and resources spent on configuration and development work. Gartner expects these aforementioned innovations to be the most significant value drivers. Clients often inquire about obtaining the single view of the customer, but often encounter shortcomings due to the inability to appropriately integrate a diverse set of tools and systems. These developments are likely to happen in the midterm, within approximately two to three years of generative AI maturation. Generative AI will be able to help either through anomaly detection, data conformance, or by flagging inconsistencies for further review while making suggestions in the process.

    Functionality Trends

    Advanced AI: All vendors in this Magic Quadrant have started to, or will have, generative AI infused into SFA key capabilities. Most notable use cases are occurring in the activity management capability, such as using AI to generate meeting and call summaries, and email responses, or to extract conversation insights. The second-most-impacted capability is guided selling, with vendors promising contextual content creation, meeting preparation and personalized real-time guidance. Lastly, investments are being made into natural-language processing and predictive capabilities to strengthen existing features, such as conversation intelligence and predictive forecasting models, but also introducing novel use cases, such as churn prediction and configurable AI/ML models.
    User Interface and Experience: Most of the vendors in the Magic Quadrant are making UI improvements or complete overhauls to improve usability and efficiency. These changes include configurable UI designers, redesigned Kanban views, and new layouts for accounts and contacts. Most notable changes leading to this Magic Quadrant are within Oracle Sales and Creatio’s Freedom UI.
    Automation and Workflows: Many SFA platform vendors are improving or adding additional workflow improvements. Much of this is geared toward introducing or improving sales development representative use cases by introducing sales engagement features, such as sales cadences or sequences. Further automation features are being introduced within guided selling features, such as through the introduction of guided lead management process steps and support for dynamic sales processes.

    Evaluation Criteria Definitions

    Ability to Execute

    Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
    Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
    Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
    Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
    Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
    Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
    Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

    Completeness of Vision

    Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
    Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
    Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
    Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
    Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
    Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
    Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
    Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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